I dreamed I was walking all over the world in bare feet. On pavement and grass, Oriental rugs and marble floors, puddles and sawdust and ice. Every new surface was surprising: I'd look down and marvel Look at me! I'm walking on mud! or Oh my gosh! I'm walking on seashells!
My confidence and delight grew with each new surface. In the background of my mind, questions swirled--how is this possible? why doesn't it hurt? am I dreaming? But my confidence and delight filled the universe and crowded out the questions and I just kept walking.
Janiqua and Rayven. Two of my piano students at KIPP College Prep middle school.
Ranesha, Janiqua and Justice. Three of my piano students at KIPP College Prep.
Mr. Keith Hart, the Johnny Appleseed of KIPP school music program. Every kid that plays an instrument in this school--about 100 at this point---got their start with this man.
Some of "the guys." I just love the self-confidence of these kids. You couldn't tell these boys that they aren't debonair.
I finished The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man last night. On my wish list for 2009: to find a community of people who like to read books and talk about them. Ideally, a local group of ten or fewer people with something more substantial than "I really liked this book" to offer in the way of discussion.
Perhaps the guy who loaned me the book will be open to some chat over coffee. But I won't get my hopes up.
My sleep cycle is "off" again so when I finished the book at 2 a.m., I wasn't ready yet for sleep. I store my stack of The Sun by the bed so I grabbed the December issue. The last words I read on the first day of the new year were these, from the Sunbeams section:
"Be yourself" is about the worst advice you can give some people. -Tom Masson
Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It's the one and only thing you have to offer. -Barbara Kingsolver
The only kinds of fights worth fighting are those you're going to lose, because somebody has to fight them and lose and lose and lose until someday, somebody who believes as you do wins. -I.F. Stone
I am not eccentric. It's just that I am more alive than most people. I am an unpopular electric eel set in a pond of goldfish. -Dame Edith Sitwell
When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in confederacy against him. -Jonathan Swift
The thing that makes you exceptional, if you are at all, is inevitably that which must also make you lonely. -Lorraine Hansberry
And also, today, beginning to feel the forest around me. The cool dark silence in the heart of it where I am the last living person.
And I am craving a cigarette. I'm thinking it wouldn't hurt to reward myself.
What could it hurt? There's no one else on Earth but me so no one will know.
The remedy for this risky moment would be a hot-out-of-the-oven brownie but my oven doesn't work.
There is nothing I can do about this from my present vantage point: sitting in pajamas at my desk. I'm going to get dressed, get on my bicycle and go see what the world has to offer.
My friend stopped blogging because he got tired of no response. I feel him.
Hardly anyone comments these days at SITC. During my "heyday," every post generated an average of two responses but they came straight to my email address, rarely appearing in the Comments section of the blog. Sometimes I wished folks would post to the blog so other people might be inspired (and released) to comment. Like being the first to get up and dance at a party, freeing the seat-dancers and wall-clingers to venture forth.
Back when blogging first burst onto the scene, a good friend urged me to throw my hat in. I don't remember exactly why now: maybe she liked my writing or maybe she wanted to keep up with my life (I was still 'on the road' at that point). Or maybe, knowing how I've struggled with a largely unexpressed passion for writing, she was encouraging me to follow my bliss.
Whatever her reasoning, I resisted because I have a thing about clutter. Of all kinds. (When the book came out about HSP (Highly Sensitive People) I attributed this trait to being an HSP. Since then it's been suggested there's no such thing and HSP was just the next trend in navel-gazing.) Blogging seemed like clutter to me. Like the world needs the noise of one more person sounding off about her pet peeves and sharing the minutiae of her little life. Like cyberspace needs another URL.
It's a crowded, cluttered world already. Sometimes the most generous contribution one can make is to sit down and shut up.
But I've been documenting my life in one form or another--diary, letters, journals--for most of my life. And given the human need/desire for visibility and contact and the Blog's obvious potential for meeting both, it was inevitable that I would succumb.
But blogs--and cell phones and computers and the internet and blackberries and etc--have only incompletely realized their potentials to make the world a smaller, cozier, more nurturing place--so far. You show up and write...for who? Friends, family, acquaintances, strangers, former lovers and who knows who else. Like walking into a dark room and sensing someone is there. But maybe it's your overactive imagination; maybe there's nobody there. Or maybe there is someone there who doesn't respond when I call "Is somebody there?"
Recently the same friend who urged me to start blogging sent a link to "An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube" by Michael Wesch. (The whole clip is embedded below because I don't know how to create an excerpt. It's long but there's some worthwhile stuff in here if you have the time.) (One of my favorite pieces is the little guys at the 13:40 marker...)
"Collapse of context" is one of several provocative ideas offered in the clip. The context for human communication continues to change. Past generations spoke to each other face to face in real time, waited weeks to receive a letter from miles away or longer to read a published book by someone they'd never met. Fast forward to Now where we make videotapes for people we've never met who may or may not be watching.
"Collapse of context" is also "expansion of possibilities": online we can pretend to be anyone--any gender, age, nationality, class. We can be voyeurs without seeming rude or deviant.
We can also ignore each other or disappear more easily.Thinking about the new etiquette required in virtual social networks like FaceBook, I asked "How do you respond when someone you don't remember from high school requests admission to your network?" Several people I know pretty well say "Just ignore them" and I flinch.
Maybe no one would miss Sojourner in the 21st Century if it disappeared....when it disappears -- as, of course, it will some day. It wasn't so much my friend's blog that I missed when it disappeared; I missed him. A voice in The Village was gone and I wondered where he was.
I have the idea that at some point I'll dump the entirety of SITC onto a CD -- or whatever storage technology is current at that point in time -- to stick in the box with my journals and song sheets and other life litter that will perhaps never be accessed by another living soul. Or maybe.... Somewhere down the line, a descendant will wonder.
In the 21st century, trees can fall and be heard generations later.
When a friend's world is rocked after hearing or reading something that Alice Walker or Gandhi or Deepak Chopra or the featured guest on Oprah today or Robert Bly or whoever said or wrote
after having no reaction when I said it
I want to be very happy for their epiphany. And I usually am. But I don't think much of them as a friend any more.
the truth another person myself love the right direction to take what I want what I've learned
A few weeks ago I was in the cast of a staged reading of Langston Hughes' "The Black Nativity." I was one among a cast of professional and semi-professional "theater people." I'm not an "actor" in the strict sense of the word; my untrained performance style is more understated or intuitive than formally trained players and I felt decidedly out of place. There were moments when my decision to participate in the production seemed a huge mistake.
But it wasn't. It put me in the Lower Ninth Ward singing gospel holiday music under a full moon--"soul food" doesn't get much bolder than this.
I was introduced to Miss Sarah's House Amphitheater (the enchanting venue where we performed) and Keith Calhoun's work (an extraordinary photographer whose work I am apparently the last to discover). And it placed me at an after-party in the future home of the Tekrema Arts Center--an inspiring site.
(photo by Keith Calhoun)
Some say there are no coincidences and no mistakes. I prefer to think in terms of there being no throw-away events in a life; everything matters, everything teaches. Even the mistakes.
It was a mistake in 1976 to give that homeless guy the key to my room at the Halifax. He emptied both my refrigerator and penny jar which was a significant inconvenience (though I had to admit it was nice of him to leave the key at the front desk). But who's to say a greater misfortune might have befallen him or me or someone else if I hadn't given him the key?
It was a coincidence that a dorm-mate from my first year of college in Greencastle, IN wandered into the public library in Bloomington IN 21 years later on the afternoon I was filling in at the circulation desk for an absent coworker. Our conversation as I processed her book selections made a profound impression on me. My sense of myself as a freshman was as an inadequate, unattractive misfit. I dropped out after one miserable year.
"We all wondered what happened to you," she revealed almost a generation later. They had all seen me as "most likely to succeed" and anticipated being able to say "we knew her when" at some bright future celebration.
